Unswitch?

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This morning, I switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox.
Next, I think I’ll look at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird.
Maybe I’ll go back, but
I’m increasingly starting to feel uncomfortable in Apple-land.
[Update: lots of people wrote me about good stuff including
good Gnome typography, Camino, OmniWeb,
and various Safari enhancements. Thanks. Will update.]

Open or Not ·
My big gripe with Apple, of course, is their cult of hermetic secrecy.
We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand
experiment: what happens when you dramatically increase a company’s
transparency? Initial results are pretty good for both of us.
Apple’s approach is of course, exactly the opposite. They control the
message, nothing that’s not part of the message can be said, nobody is
allowed to say anything except for Steve, and they’ll sue your ass
if you step out of bounds.

That court case is really irritating; the judge cleverly side-stepped the
issue of whether free-speech guarantees apply to bloggers by finding on the
basis that this wasn’t about free speech, it was about trade secrets.
Should Apple win, each and every player in the financial industry who’s
trying to do something sleazy or unscrupulous will be able to claim that
their accounting practices or transfer pricing or whatever are “trade
secrets” and litigate aggressively against anyone, journalist or otherwise, who
tries to get at the truth.
Enron’s “special-purpose entities”? Trade secrets. Worldcom’s revenue-recognition policy? Trade secret. Write about it and you’re in court.

I don’t know, maybe traditional message management will work for Apple;
arguably transparency matters less when you’re selling Kool Toys to Kool Kids
is, as opposed to selling long-term infrastructure bets to businesspeople.

Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
They’re basically adopting the position that they know
everything, and they don’t have to talk to the world except in oracular
outbursts, and they don’t need, particularly, to listen to what the world’s
saying.

Secondly Safari has a horrible bug that bit me one too many times.
I end up usually having a lot of tabs; either I’ve run through my RSS feeds
and opened a bunch of things but haven’t had time to read them yet, or I have
read them but they’re interesting and I’m keeping them around to do something with.
If I accidentally hit command-Q instead of command-W to close a tab (so
easy), Safari silently checks out without asking me if I want to save or
review my unsaved work.
No other Apple app—in fact, no other sane app in the universe—does this, and
I reported it to Apple way last year sometime.
I can’t tolerate an application that silently discards work-in-progress.

Impressions of Firefox so far? Noticeably quicker, but only on some
pages. Not quite as smart about filling forms. Controls are square grey ugly
Windows-y things, not smooth blue extruded Aqua things. Safari renders
JPEGs a little darker which looks a bit better, not sure which is more
accurate.

Unswitch? ·
There are a few reasons I’d consider leaving Mac-land:

I’m mad at them (see above).

The laptop is too slow. I bought it in early 2003 and it’s wearing out
and I want something twice as fast and Apple doesn’t have it.

The screen isn’t that great.

I work for Sun, I’d like to run our software.

What would unswitching really cost me that would actually hurt?

The beautiful user interface. When you get used to all the
drop-shadowing and anti-aliasing and Exposé and so on, the thought of living
in a battleship-grey X Windows world with jaggedy spidery fonts is
unappealing.

Fast start. This, to be honest, was the single most crucial feature in
bringing me to this computer. I turn it on and it asks me for my password
and I’m working right then. I’ve never seen any other
operating system do this.

WiFi. You turn it on, if the WiFi is out there OS X finds it and does
the housekeeping for you.

PhotoShop Elements; I’ve gotten awfully used to it.

I suspect that if I went to JDS/Solaris or some other GNU/Linux (Windows?
Are you kidding?), I’d have
all sorts of little convenience problems (basically, you plug pretty well
anything into the USB or FireWire on a Mac and It Just Works), but the ones
above are the real gating issues.

On the other hand, maybe Apple will dial back the infofascism and figure
out how to ship a fast laptop with a good screen.